


A Pair of Gloomy Old Bachelors

by toushindai (WallofIllusion)



Category: Baccano!
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-07
Updated: 2015-11-07
Packaged: 2018-04-30 09:39:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5158970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WallofIllusion/pseuds/toushindai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Promoted to contaiuolo for the Martillo Family, Maiza thinks about where he's headed in life over a late-night coffee with Ronny.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Pair of Gloomy Old Bachelors

**Author's Note:**

> Y'might be able to follow this if you've only seen the anime? Though it's definitely more novel-based. Also, you will pry "no matter" (vs "never mind" as used by the official comic translations) from my cold, dead hands.

192X

Evening

 

Just as Maiza was about to finally retire for the night, there was a knock on the front door of his apartment. He raised an eyebrow in that direction, slipped back into his dressing-gown, and went to answer it.

To Maiza’s surprise, the Martillos’ _chiamatore_ stood on the other side of the door.

“Oh, Ronny,” he said. “Do you need something?”

“Not at all,” the other man replied with a dry smile. “I simply noticed you were still awake and wondered if you would like some company.”

Maiza answered Ronny’s smile with a knowing smile of his own. “By ‘noticed,’ I suspect you don’t mean that you wandered by and saw my lights on.”

“Not quite that, no. But if I’m unwelcome, I’ll leave. I only thought that if something were on your mind, it may serve you better to discuss it rather than stewing in it alone.”

“As one of my oldest friends and the _chiamatore_ of my organization, how could you ever be unwelcome? Come in, come in.” Maiza stood back to allow his friend to enter. “Can I offer you a drink?”

“At one in the morning? Immortality is fostering some bad habits in you, Maiza.”

“So you say, but it seemed to me that you were the heaviest drinker at my party tonight.”

“Would I shame my protégé by holding back at the celebration of his promotion?” Ronny shed his coat and hung it on the hook by the door, then placed his hat atop it. “Well, no matter. I admit that that was quite enough liquor for the evening. I’ll take coffee if you’re having some, but don’t trouble yourself otherwise.”

“It’s no trouble at all.” Maiza headed to the kitchen to brew some coffee as Ronny settled familiarly into his couch. Over his shoulder, he said, “You have it wrong, though—it’s not my own thoughts keeping me up. Victor Talbot was here until just a little while ago.”

“In the middle of the night?”

“He was waiting on my doorstep when I got home, to be precise.”

At that, Ronny only snorted. “And what did Victor have to say?”

“Oh, much the same as the last time. That I should stop involving myself with this ‘gang nonsense,’ wash my hands of it all, and have a drink with him again soon, because I’m a bigger man than this. And then he told me at great length and with an impressive amount of profanity exactly how he feels about gangs. Honestly, when you knocked, I wondered if he’d come back to continue his rant.”

“Sorry to disappoint,” Ronny said, his smirk audible in his voice.

“Haha, not at all.”

Maiza remained in the kitchen while the coffee brewed, thinking over some of the other things Victor had had to say. When the coffee was ready, he added a spoonful of cream to Ronny’s and a handful of sugar cubes to his own before bringing them to the living room. Ronny tasted his coffee, nodded in approval, and then leaned back in the couch as Maiza took a seat in the armchair opposite.

“Victor never was any good at minding his own business—but no matter. Did he choose the day of your promotion to harass you specifically, or was that an unfortunate coincidence?”

“It seems he was aware. And I wouldn’t call it harassment. We were friends of a sort, for a while there, so I can understand his frustration—even if it seems he greatly overestimates me.”

“Overestimates you?”

“The camorra is hardly my first foray into organized crime,” Maiza reminded him. “I’ve never been the ‘bigger man’ he thinks I am. Honestly, the Martillo Family is several steps _up_ from the Rotten Eggs—but to Victor it’s all the same, I suppose. Which is why I had to remind him several times that we’re the camorra rather than the mafia.”

Ronny rolled his eyes over the top of his coffee and then put the cup down on the low table before him. “And how does it feel to be climbing the ranks of organized crime yet again? Are you nostalgic for your old Lotto Valentino days? That was before you met Dalton, wasn’t it.”

“It was,” Maiza said. “I was a different person back then.”

For a moment, that was all he said; he left the question of how he felt unanswered. Then he, too, set his cup down on the coffee table and gazed seriously at his friend—at the devil who had granted him the knowledge of immortality, then taken human form and stayed by his side for two centuries. At the man who had drawn him into the business of the Martillo Family and coaxed him to its top ranks. Ronny gazed back, quirking a single eyebrow under Maiza’s stare. A long moment passed.

Finally, Maiza sighed and leaned back in his chair. His normal polite smile remained in place, and it wasn’t false, but there was a wry reluctance to it. “I know what you’re up to, by the way,” he said.

“Oh?”

“Oh, yes. I’ve known for a few years, in fact.”

“Have you, now.” Ronny retrieved his coffee and took an unconcerned sip. His eyes never left Maiza’s. “From the way you’re speaking, you don’t seem to think that I simply wished for a prestigious post for an old friend of mine.”

A moment of consternation crossed Maiza’s face. “I don’t doubt that, Ronny,” he said. “I’m not accusing you of ill intent. …In fact, I suspect quite the opposite.”

Ronny lowered his eyes to his coffee with a soft smirk, and Maiza knew he was right.

“You don’t plan to let me go once I’ve taken care of Szilard, do you?”

 

Szilard.

The man who had turned against the rest of the alchemists on the _Advenna_ _Avis_ , devouring nearly half of the passengers and turning what had been a voyage of hope and triumph into a tragedy.

The man who had devoured Maiza’s younger brother.

Maiza didn’t speak his name often, but he was rarely far from Maiza’s mind. It was nothing as burning, as driving, as revenge that consumed Maiza’s thoughts. It was a cold hatred mixed with resolve: Someday, Szilard would find him and come for the knowledge of the Elixir of Immortality. When that day came, Maiza would devour him.

And after that—

 

“You know I’m tired, Ronny—I’ve never kept that secret from you. The thought of having to endure decades, _centuries_ more of this life terrifies me. So you must know that I’ve planned to ask you to devour me as soon as I’ve finished Szilard off. Wasn’t that the agreement? ‘If you grow weary of immortal life, seek out one of your companions and ask them to devour you; if none remain, come to me.’”

“I did say something like that, yes,” Ronny agreed.

“But you and I both know that the camorra’s laws forbid killing one of our own. Should I take this to mean you don’t want to fulfill your end of the bargain?” 

Ronny only continued to smirk into his coffee, and Maiza knew that there were any number of answers he could give to that challenge. Ronny was a devil, something fundamentally inhuman. Perhaps he would say that Maiza had been a fool to believe a devil’s words from the start, or that while any other Immortals remained, he was no “companion” of Maiza’s. 

He would be well within his rights to say these things—but all he said instead was, “What are you asking me, Maiza?”

Maiza spoke seriously. “I just need to know that you’ll let me die when it’s time. As a fellow Martillo, you can’t devour me yourself. I understand that. I’ve let you put me in that position. But promise me that you’ll let someone else eat me, and explain to Molsa afterwards.” For a moment, Ronny said nothing in response; he only drained his cup and shook his head when Maiza offered him more. He turned the cup a thoughtful half-circle on its saucer before setting it down once more and speaking at last, his eyes curious.

“If you say you’ve known my intention, I have to wonder why you’ve gone along with it. Had you remained unallied with the Martillo Family, I could have devoured you without compunctions whenever you asked. So why?” Ronny leaned forward, intrigued. “Why join the Family at all, let alone accept the _contaiuolo_ position?”

It was Maiza’s turn to stare into his coffee then, although there was not as much amusement on his face as there’d been on Ronny’s. “To be honest, I’ve been asking myself that question for a few hours now—Victor’s visit got my mind to wandering. Tactful as he is, he asked what I’d do once Szilard was gone. Though he did retract the question a moment later.” Maiza shrugged and raised his eyes, looking a little sheepish. “I don’t mean to give you the impression that I’m constantly moping around, waiting to die; to be honest, the feeling comes and goes. I’ve enjoyed my time with the Martillos so far, and I like Molsa and Yaguruma and little Firo and all the rest. On top of that, I trust you. …Perhaps that’s why I’ve gone along with it, more than anything else.”

“Trusting a devil? Are you sure that’s wise?” Ronny quipped.

“It’s gotten me this far,” Maiza answered. 

“Hmm.” For a moment, it seemed that Ronny might question aloud whether that was indeed a good thing or not. But instead he shrugged it off with a, “Well, no matter.” 

A long moment passed in silence. Ronny lit a cigarette and began smoking; when Maiza finished his own coffee, he did the same. Eventually, he leaned forward to tap ash into the ashtray, and that was when he met Ronny’s eyes again. 

“I notice you didn’t make that promise I asked for,” he said, his face serious.

“Ahh, and I thought I’d gotten away with it. Well, no matter.” Ronny blew out a long lungful of smoke and then looked at his friend with an unusual frankness on his face. “Here’s the problem, Maiza: I’ve already made someone a promise concerning you.”

At that wholly unexpected pronouncement, Maiza’s brow furrowed. “Who…?”

“I’m not in the habit of revealing others’ secrets. …But if I tell you that the promise was to hang around you until you could smile again, I think you might be able to figure it out.”

The face of another old friend flashed through Maiza’s mind. “Yes, I could probably hazard a guess,” he said, shaking his head wryly.

“The night Szilard leapt overboard, I offered one wish to a certain idiot who shall remain nameless. And what he asked for originally was a genuine smile from me.” The corners of Ronny’s lips turned upward, but there was more puzzlement in his eyes than mirth. “It’s probably the strangest request I’ve ever received. I wasn’t able to fulfill it at the time, so he offered me an extension on the condition that I looked after you. And now here we are.”

“Here we are,” Maiza agreed. His face was serious. “But we’re hardly a pair of gloomy old bachelors, you and I. I think you’ve fulfilled both parts of that promise by now.”

“You think so? I’m not so sure.” Ronny took a drag on his cigarette. “This certainly is amusing, living in the world like a human and playing gangster with you. But once you’re gone, I’ll owe him that smile he asked for two hundred years ago, and I don’t know that I’ll be willing or able to smile on command. Especially if my friend had just disappeared from the world.”

He pinned Maiza with a serious stare that left the former alchemist silent, and the two finished their cigarettes without speaking. Finally, Ronny stood and reached for his overcoat.

“You should get some sleep, Maiza,” he said. “We don’t want you handling our books at anything less than your best.”

“Hahaha, that’s true,” Maiza answered. But he was aware—perhaps because of the mention of his old friend—that his laugh rang a little hollow. “Thank you for stopping by, Ronny. It’s been an illuminating conversation.”

“Oh?” In the middle of slipping his left arm into his jacket’s sleeve, Ronny paused. “Don’t waste too much thought on the promise I made to that idiot. Like I said, it amuses me to travel through this world with you. That I’m keeping my promise to him is merely incidental.” 

Maiza raised one eyebrow. “Thank you… I think? Is that a compliment?” 

“Hmph. I mean it to be. But no matter.”

Ronny put on his hat and pulled the brim low. With his hand on the doorknob, he turned back one final time. “About that promise you want out of me…”

Still seated, Maiza looked up at him, listening.

“I’m not the kind of being who _needs_ to hold fast to bargains and implications made centuries ago to a creature like you. And like you said, as another member of the Family, I can’t devour you myself. But as your friend, I promise you this: if you find someone else to devour you, I won’t interfere. And I’ll make sure they don’t suffer any fallout from the Martillos. …In return, I expect you to stay by my side and entertain me in the meantime, so that I’m not left high and dry when that Smile Junkie comes back for me.”

Maiza bowed his head with a smile. “We have a deal.”

*

1930

When Firo turned away to talk to the young woman—Szilard’s homunculus—Ronny gripped Maiza’s shoulder.

“Go home, Maiza.”

His friend’s words were inviting, but Maiza shook his head. “I need to explain to everyone—”

“I’ll take care of it. Besides, do you really want to spoil their fun? Your pessimism is out of place here, and you know it.”

The alleyway suddenly erupted in cheers directed at Firo and the young woman, and Maiza had to admit that Ronny’s point, while blunt, was inarguable. They were all of them filled with optimism, not yet understanding what a burden had been placed on their shoulders, and to try to break through that now would be cruel.

Ronny sighed. “You don’t seem to understand that their optimism may be warranted. —Well, no matter. You should go home and rest, and absorb what’s happened. I’m sure it’s quite a shock, if the fact that you just asked Firo to kill you is any indication.”

Maiza adjusted his glasses, wincing a little. That had been foolish of him, and unkind. “You’re right. I should rest.”

“Good.” Ronny patted Maiza’s back. “And don’t worry—I haven’t forgotten the promise I made to you. If you want to ask one of this lot to devour you now that circumstances have changed, I won’t stop you. But I think you should take Firo’s words to heart first.”

Knowing which words Ronny was referring to, Maiza gave an embarrassed smile and pulled the brim of his hat low. ”I’ll think about it,” he said. “Firo made some pretty good points.”

“He did.”

With one last nod to Ronny, Maiza left the crowd behind him, dutifully turning Firo’s words over in his mind.

 _Oh, and_ just by the way _, Maiza—we’d miss you if you were gone, so please try to live a little longer._

Realizing he felt the same way of every one of the people who’d become immortal today, Maiza chuckled quietly to himself—

And then he stepped out of the alleyway and into the sun.


End file.
